Saturday, April 22, 2017

Blogs and Ends

There were a couple of things I didn't have room for in my Westworld critique.

First, Why would people spend $40,000 a day to give themselves a raging case of PTSD? Which is what would happen to 98% of the Guests.

Second. The belief that if all constraints are removed from humans that we will automatically revert to murderous rape monsters can be disproved easily enough by anyone who has played computer games in the last ten years.

Ten years ago there was a brief vogue in morality based game play. The best two known examples of this were Bioshock and Fallout 3.

About the fifth time through I would try and play as evil just shake things up. I remember being shocked by the fact that I could actually blow up the town of Megaton. When I went to look over it's ruins, I felt kind of bad over the fact that I had turned Moira into a ghoul. But I played on for bit.

Went to Paradise Falls and started following their slave gathering missions. I remember how I didn't like how Three Dog was now describing me as demon who had crawled up out of the ground, where as before he had sung my praises to the wasteland. Red's pleading with me after I collared her was the end. I went back to Paradise Falls, got paid for betraying Red, listened to Ratchet's plans to rape her later than evening and hit VATS

*head*

*head*

*head*

I shot up the rest of the Paradise Falls and opened the slave pens. I was sad that Red wasn't there. I played the rest of that game as a good guy but of course once you blow up megaton there isn't enough good guy karma available to reverse that.

Bioshock was worse in that I had to kill a little a girl to collect the ADAM. Tried that once. Done.

Morality based RP fell out fashion because it just wasn't being used.

Think about this, even with the graphics being what they were ten years ago, it was too unpleasant to play an evil character. Now think about Westworld where the girl-bot screaming in your arms, is indistinguishable from a live woman. Where the blood pumping out the wound you just opened looks as real as the look of agony on your victim's face.

Westworld is a park for psycho/socipaths with a pronounced sadistic streak. From a business perspective this model is just plain stupid. There are probably less than twenty five active serial killers operating at any given moment. Demographically speaking only one might (just might) be rich enough to afford to spend a week at Westworld. This is a park which realistically only has one customer and he can only afford to be there one week a year.